Intro to PPHA 30538
Peter Ganong and Maggie Shi
January 5, 2026
Course overview
Introduction: Who Are We?
Maggie Shi
Assistant Professor at Harris since 2023
PhD in Economics from Columbia, 2022
Health economist thinking about how to reduce waste in healthcare
Avid foodie, proud dog mom of Truffles and human mom of Max
Introduction: Who Are We?
Peter Ganong
At Harris since 2017
28 out of first 30 years of life in Boston (one year doing Jewish studies in Israel, one year at White House Council of Economic Advisers)
One year working at City of Boston analytics team
Research on labor and public economics, meta analysis
Hobbies with my kids: baking, rock climbing, swimming, Jewish learning, Cubs. Just started on coding and triathlons with my oldest…
Roadmap: what you will learn
Data extraction, visualization and communication, plus some tech skills
Curriculum
Apply this knowledge to the public sector
Course quirks
Step 1: Curriculum
Version control (Git and Github) – non-representative low workload this week
Advanced visualization curriculum
Spatial data (continued)
Dashboards
Webscraping
“Soft skills”
Step 2: public sector: datasets
Data Type
Description
Hospital closures
CMS
Healthcare fraud
HHS OIG
Parking tickets
Chicago DOT
Public transportation
Chicago DOT
Powerplants
EIA
Course Quirks
teaching method – intensive, hands-on support, active participation
self sufficiency
contemporary & realistic over perfect & clean
quirk 1: teaching method – intensive, hands-on support
Mon/Tues afternoon labs: second half is group office hours (time to start working on problem set, and to give and get help).
Wed/Thu/Fri: Additional 4 x 80 minutes group office hours
Practice, practice, practice
The problem sets are intentionally long
You should expect to commit 10-20 hrs/week to course
If you’re spending >20, reach out to your instructor or TA for additional help on being efficient
Awesome teaching assistants
Teaching Team
Richard Chen
Head TA
2nd Year PhD student
Alex Lan
Head TA
Third year PhD student
Teaching Team
Mauro Ttito
Instructional TA
Second-year MSCAPP
Ralph Valery Valiere
Instructional TA
MPP Alum
Teaching Team
Yuxin Chen
Instructional TA
Second-year MPP
Yuri Chang
Admin TA
Second-year MSCAPP